Coding

David Grundy, Never by Itself Alone: Queer Poetry, Queer Communities in Boston and
the Bay Area, 1944–Present (OUP) $120

Reviewing Stephen Coote’s The Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse (TLS, 22-28 April 1983), Alan Hollinghurst, of all people, roundly declared that ‘the increasing self-segregation of gays has had an enfeebling effect on their art’. This was a commonplace critical stance at the time, though less so coming from a gay critic. Hollinghurst’s main objection was to the new directness, where oblique coding had once been the norm. There was also the implication, inherited via the strictures of the New Criticism, that each poem should be able to stand on its own (actually a fair requirement for anthology pieces), but that many of these could not. The poem Hollinghurst especially objected to, all the more so because of its prominent position as the last item in the book, was Michael Rumaker’s ‘The Fairies Are Dancing All Over the World’. You can tell from the title alone why he shrank from its effusiveness.

Several years later, Peter Parker began a positive review of my own book Articulate Flesh: Male Homo-Eroticism and Modern Poetry: ‘The lamentable final quarter of The Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse (1983) demonstrated the dangers inherent in labels, and in anthologies where subject-matter rather than skill becomes a guiding principle’ (TLS, 15–21 July 1988). My book met his approval even though it did not ignore ‘the outpourings of Harold Norse, E.A. Lacey, Mutsuo Takahashi and others’ who had been anthologised by Coote. Well, that ‘lamentable’ ...